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RE: [birt-dev] Copyright notice update after a code change

According to the Eclipse legal guideline in
http://www.eclipse.org/legal/copyrightandlicensenotice.php ,
only a date *range* is expected in the Copyright notice:
 
"{DATE} is either a year or a range of years with the first and last
years of the range separated by a comma. So for example: "2004" or
"2000, 2004". The first year is when the contents of the file were first
created and the last year is the last year is when the contents were
last modified."
 
In other words, it should be something like this, which would include
any or all years in between 2004 and 2007.
     Copyright (c) 2004, 2007 Actuate Corporation.
 
Also found this posting, see below, that describes an "Advanced Fix
Copyrights" tool for updating the copyright notice in source.
 
Linda
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 18:02:39 +0200

From: "Oberhuber, Martin" <Martin.Oberhuber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: [cross-project-issues-dev] Fix Copyrights vs. Advanced Fix
Copyrights

To: "Cross project issues" <cross-project-issues-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi all,

as the Europa release is getting closer and closer, it will be time
sometime soon to make a pass over the copyright comments in the source
files, in order to ensure they are there and the copyright year is
updated in case the file was changed in 2007.

You'll certainly all know that the releng.tools package has two tools
for this: "Fix Copyrights" and "Advanced Fix Copyrights".

You get the releng.tools package from any Eclpse Platform Download page,
its near the end of that page.

Since I didn't really find documentation what the two alternative
copyright tools do, and what's the difference between them, I went and
looked at the source code. Find below what I found out.

I'm E-Mailing this to this group for the following reasons:

1. If anybody knows about real documentation of this, please let me
know!

2. If anybody has a "how-to" explaining how to best do the copyright
pass, please let me know!

3. If nobody knows, I hope what I found out is helpful for the group as
a whole.

I know that it's not necessarily time yet to really do the copyright
pass, but I thought that perhaps we'll come up with some enhancement
requests to the tool itself, such that it can be improved or fixed until
the time we'll really need it (some time around June 28 I guess [just
kidding] :-).

So, here is what I think I found out:

* Fix copyrights
  - Does not use Preferences, uses all hard-coded IBM values
  - only processes copyrights where IBM Corp is on the copyright line
  + Works on .java, .properties, .c, .sh, .bat files
  + Always writes a default ibm copyright text in default format
    - i.e. adds the "and others" string if not there
    - fixes the number of *# characters
    - Changes "Initial Contributors" --> "Contributors"
  + processes Contributors specially
  + Available on Resource and PDE perspectives
  --> Should be renamed to "Fix IBM Copyrights" ?

* Advanced Fix Copyrights
  + Uses the information from the Copyright Preference page
  - Works on .java, .properties files only
  + Adds initial copyrights as per the template if necessary
  - If a comment is already there, only looks for comments which
    have the company name according to the Preference Template
    (Doesn't even do CVS lookups if different than template)
  + Available on Resource perspective only
  - Might remove a copyright owner (IBM in this case) if you have a
String like:
    Copyright (c) 2006, 2007 IBM Corporation, Wind River Systems, Inc.
and others.

Here is what I've been recommending to my group for the non-IBM
copyrights:
1. One member of every participating company to do it
   for their respective company's copyrights 2. With releng.tools
installed, go to Window > Preferences > Copyright, and enter the default
copyright for 
   (name-your-company).
3. Then switch to Resource Perspective and do Right-click > Advanced Fix
Copyrights.
   You can do it for ALL the projects since it will look
   at copyrights matching your template only.
4. Using Team > Synchronize, verify that it did not do
   any harm to the copyrights.

And here is my initial enhancement request:
1. Make "Advanced Fix Copyrights" work on more file types

Cheers,
--
Martin Oberhuber
Wind River Systems, Inc.
Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm


------------------------------

 

________________________________

From: birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Gary Xue
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 5:31 PM
To: birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [birt-dev] Copyright notice update after a code change



This is a reminder to all BIRT developers that BIRT source code that are
checked into CVS should be updated to include all years in which
non-trivial revisions have been made to the code. The current year
should be added to the list of years in the copyright notice (usually in
the header of the Java file) before you check in changes as part of a
feature development or bug fix. If you create a new file, or come across
a new file that's missing the copyright notice, please make sure to add
a notice to the header.

 

As an example, if you are checking in changes today to an existing file
containing the following line in the copyright notice,

         Copyright (c) 2004, 2005 Actuate Corporation.

 

you should update the line to read

         Copyright (c) 2004, 2005, 2007 Actuate Corporation.

 

 

thanks,

-
Gary Xue
Actuate Corporation - Product Development
(O) +1-650-270-9672

 



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